'In the Face of Evil'

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and chief executive officer of WND. He is the author or co-author of 13 books that have sold more than 5 million copies, including his latest, "The Restitution of All Things: Israel, Christians, and the End of the Age." Before launching WND as the first independent online news outlet in 1997, he served as editor in chief of major market dailies including the legendary Sacramento Union.

Author’s note: Now that this great documentary is finally available, I wanted you to see what I had to say about it four months ago. My enthusiam about this film has not diminished. I’m so excited that you now have a chance to view and own this masterpiece. Please see, buy it, share it. This is a movie that can change the world.

I just saw a great movie.

It’s rare that I can get excited enough about a film to wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone enthusiastically and without reservation.

This is an unusual movie. It was not produced to entertain, but, I assure you, you will be riveted to the screen for 110 minutes.

It’s a film you will want to see more than once. I’m already looking forward to sharing it with my wife and my children.

The movie is “In the Face of Evil,” a timely film about Ronald Reagan’s pivotal role in the Cold War victory over communism.

It is based on Peter Schweizer’s acclaimed best-seller “Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism,” my favorite biography of the late president. But the movie goes further than the book. It provides context for Reagan’s vision and achievements that have the utmost relevance for us as Americans today as we find ourselves engulfed in a global conflict every bit as real and deadly as the battle with communism.

The movie opens by painting the grim picture of the first half of the 20th century and the series of totalitarian regimes – all of them socialist in one form or another – that murdered at least 150 million people.

But in the middle of that century, the filmmakers show, arose a man of strong moral courage and principle who called evil by its name and resolutely declared, in the face of scorn, that the world had no other choice but to crush it.

For many Christians, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” moved them like no other movie ever made. I’ve got to tell you that, as an American, this movie had that same effect on me.

It is truth. And truth is powerful.

“In the Face of Evil” is engaging because of the use of rare footage, combined with narration and interviews with key contemporary figures that help place Reagan’s achievements and vision in context. Just as “Reagan’s War” used former Soviet archives material to make the case that Reagan was right, this film uses high-ranking Soviet intelligence defectors who leave no doubt about the importance of this great man to the preservation of freedom in the world.

Reagan recognized early on there was only one way to fight totalitarianism and win – without compromise, without appeasement, without hesitation, without mincing words. It worked in Hollywood as he led the fight of the Screen Actors Guild to turn back an attempt by Soviet apparatchiks to take control of the most powerful medium in the world. And it worked on a grander scale in his showdown with a Soviet Union that had grown, by the time he became president, into a mightier and more determined military power than the United States.

Reagan didn’t blink. He didn’t blink when he was in Hollywood and communist goons threatened to destroy his acting career by throwing acid in his face. He didn’t blink as California governor during the 1960s when his campuses were ablaze. And he sure didn’t blink when he was face to face with the Evil Empire headed by Mikhail Gorbachev.

The movie is uplifting. It is inspirational. It is educational.

Now for what makes this film so relevant today.

Throughout the documentary, we see Reagan faced with adversaries – not just the Soviet Union and communists, but the useful idiots with their peace symbols and their nuclear freeze placards.

The film makes no bones about who was behind these people. They were funded by the Soviet Union as a tool of expansionism, a means of keeping the United States and the West off balance politically.

Does that sound familiar?

Do we have such appeasers amidst us today?

Are any of them running for high political office this November?

That’s right. John Kerry, though he does not appear in this film, was very much one of those useful idiots. He did the bidding of the Evil Empire in 1971 when he returned from Vietnam. He did the bidding of the Evil Empire throughout his political career when he denounced Reagan as a warmonger. He did the bidding of the Evil Empire when he joined the nuclear freeze movement. He did the bidding of the Evil Empire when he opposed the invasion of Grenada and the support of the freedom fighters in Nicaragua.

In short, John Kerry, the man who would be president, was on the wrong side of the greatest conflict of the 20th century.

And he uses those mistakes, those colossal blunders, those moral errors of the past as his resume for the presidency so he can lead us in the great global conflict of the 21st century.

How bizarre is that?

And how bizarre is it that he is within a few percentage points of winning?